Former Obama teammate Dan Hale to coach Marshall boys' basketball

Marshall High School has named Dan Hale its new boys' basketball coach, replacing Bobby Forst. Until he makes a name for himself with victories at Marshall, Hale will be best known as a teammate of president Barack Obama on Punahou School's 1979 high school state championship basketball team in Honolulu. Hale was a three-time all-state player at Punahou.
Hale played at the University of Hawaii and Chaminade University (also in Hawaii) and coached Punahou to the 2008 state championship. Over the years, Hale has coached at the youth, high school and collegiate levels.

Woodgrove, Tuscarora fill out winter coaching staffs

Loudoun's newest high schools continued to fill out their coaching staffs this week as Woodgrove and Tuscarora each filled winter head coaching positions with familiar names from around the county.

Steve Douglas (left) was named the new boys' basketball coach at Woodgrove while Jarod Brown (right) was tapped for the head job at Tuscarora. (Tracy Woodward, TWP)

Steve Douglas, who led Dominion to the AA Division 3 quarterfinals in the 2008-09 season, will make the jump to Purcellville's Woodgrove Wolverines and will look to continue the success he experienced in three short years in Sterling. A graduate of Fairmont State College, Douglas was a member of the 1998 Loudoun Valley Vikings team that reached the Virginia state final -- the furthest a Loudoun boys' team had ever advanced until Potomac Falls brought home a state title in March. Douglas brings 14 years of high school basketball experience as he returns to his native Western Loudoun.

Douglas will be joined at Woodgrove by Kevin Copley, another coach with local ties, who was tapped to lead the Wolverines' girl's basketball program. Copley -- who most recently served as a technology education teacher at Stone Bridge and Heritage -- has coached boys' basketball at James Wood as well as football (James Wood, Millbrook, Loudoun Valley) and girls' and boys' track (Millbrook). He coached four years of college football at Fairmont State and Shenandoah University and spent three years as an assistant principal at Millbrook.

Stone Bridge keeps its footing in boys' soccer win over Robinson

During football season, Stone Bridge's field provided the perfect home-field advantage in the state semifinals when it turned into a mud bowl as the Bulldogs topped a Massaponax team that saw its quickness nullified by the drudge.

On Friday evening, the scars from the same torn-up field in Ashburn again provided a home-field advantage for the No. 2 Bulldogs, as top-ranked Robinson (5-1, 1-0 Virginia AAA Concorde) struggled to maintain possession on the pockmarked pitch and Stone Bridge used a first-half penalty kick from Abdul Shaban to top the Rams, 1-0, in a battle of the area's best.

"That's what you want to be: number one," Shaban said. "Everyone is going to be gunning for us now."

The Bulldogs (6-0, 3-0 Virginia AAA Liberty) were accustomed to the field and chose their spots to possess throughout the game, otherwise using the long diagonal ball with the wind at their back to pin Robinson in its own defensive third for much of the first half.
The game's lone goal, however, was set up by individual hustle.

Stone Bridge senior forward Christian Salinas challenged a Robinson defender and blocked his attempted clearance, then chased the ball down and tapped it around the goalkeeper, who promptly took Salinas down, and the ref quickly whistled for a penalty.
Shaban stepped up and buried it to the left side in the upper netting, later acknowledging he hadn't intended to go top shelf.

Despite the one goal lead, however, Stone Bridge spent much of the second half on its heels and in its own half fighting the wind and an aggressive Robinson team in search of the equalizer.

"In the second half [the direct style] worked against us," Shaban said. "Every time we tried to go forward it came right back in our face. We just had to stay focused. . . . From that point on every body stepped up."

Fredrikson lifts girls' team

The penalty call was somewhat questionable, but Stone Bridge junior defender Emily Fredrikson left little doubt with her spot kick, sending a powerful shot into the lower right corner to lift the No. 9 Bulldogs to a 1-0 win over No. 10 Robinson in the second game of the doubleheader in Ashburn.

In a fast-paced contest that saw much of its action take place in the middle third of the field with most quality chances coming in the first half, it took Fredrikson's late penalty kick call to break the stalemate.

Murielle Tiernan did well to beat her defender on the end line with 5 minutes 39 seconds remaining in the game but was stopped on a strong challenge by a Robinson defender, who connected with the ball in what appeared to be a 50-50-type challenge. The ball rolled toward the top of the box and after a couple seconds the ref whistled for a penalty.
"I think I hit her leg but she kind of took me out too," Tiernan said. "It could have gone either way."

It was a crucial win for Stone Bridge (4-0-1, 2-0 Virginia AAA Liberty), which was missing two key players and wanted revenge after being knocked out of the Virginia AAA Northern Region playoffs by Robinson (2-3-2, 0-2 Virginia AAA Concorde) last year.
Neither team was able to find the back of the net in the first half, though both had their share of chances.

Stone Bridge hit the crossbar 12 minutes into the game and had two more solid chances in the half -- the best came on a counterattack with just seconds left before the half, but Ashley Herndon wasn't able to catch up to an effort from Tiernan and the ball slid just wide of the far post.

Robinson pressured the Bulldogs' defense on occasion, too, and Brigitte Kuter's shot gave the goalkeeper some work as the rain started to come down.
But in the second half neither team threatened with more than a half-chance, and it took Tiernan's late run and Fredrikson's well-placed penalty to settle the outcome.
"It was a lot of playing in the middle, not a lot of possession," Fredrikson said. "We didn't want to give up, we kept going and Murielle made a great run down the sideline and got us that [penalty]."

Park View, Potomac Falls fill football coaching vacancies

After a tumultuous offseason that featured a multitude of changes in the coaching ranks of Loudoun County’s football programs, the final two head coaching vacancies were officially filled Tuesday.

Ferris Eways (Park View) and Mike Gims (Potomac Falls) were approved by the Loudoun County School Board as the new head men at their respective AA Dulles District programs and now begin their task of building up a pair of Sterling teams at opposite ends of the league standings a year ago.

Eways comes to Sterling after serving as a graduate assistant coach at Michigan State University following three years as offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at Centreville, his alma mater. A wide receiver and 2004 graduate of Towson, Eways interned as an assistant strength and conditioning coach for the Washington Redskins for three seasons. In all, he has 10 years of football-related experience at the high school and collegiate level. Park View Athletic Director Joe Breinig, Jr., sent a release to announce the hiring earlier this week.

Ferris Eways Named Park View Football Coach

Former Michigan State assistant and Redskins strength and conditioning coach Ferris Eways has been named Park View's new head football coach. Eways, an All-Northern Region wide receiver at Centreville in the late 1990s, takes over for Andy Hill, who got the South Lakes job last month. Park View went 7-3 this past season under Hill, won their first playoff game but fell in the AA Divison 3 final to Handley. This will be Eways's first stint as a head coach.

Fairfax hires football coach

Before joining his baseball players Tuesday afternoon for their bus ride to a game at Langley, Fairfax Coach Kevin Simonds had some other Rebels that he needed to meet with — the school’s football players.

Simonds, the Fairfax baseball coach for the past three years, was introduced Tuesday as the Rebels’ new football coach. He replaces Chris Haddock, who previously had stepped down to take the head football job at Centreville.

"I kept asking him when we got to the sixth inning, 'How do you feel?' He said 'I feel fine.' When we got to the eighth, I said. 'Your pitch count is getting up,' and he said, 'I want the ball.' He deserves the ball, so that's why we stuck with him.

"We made the switch [after the eighth inning] because he was approaching 140, 150 pitches -- I haven't checked the chart, but sometimes you can throw that chart out the window. It's what they feel."

What do you think? Is 150+ pitches too many for a high schooler early in the season? Is it too many period? Or should the player have a say in when he comes out of the game if he's continuing to perform and not losing velocity on his pitches?

Three Loudoun athletes choose schools

Loudoun County senior forward Kendra Holmes, the 2009 Virginia AA Division 4 state player of the year, verbally accepted a full scholarship offer to play basketball at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee, this week.

The 5-9 standout was the anchor on the interior during the Lady Raiders' run to the 2009 Division 4 state championship and continued to excel against taller post players in her senior season. With no developed point guard on the roster this winter, Holmes was also forced to bring the ball up the court before passing it off to get set up in the paint.

With Holmes, the Lady Raiders won a pair of Dulles District regular season and tournament titles as well as the 2009 state championship. In 2009, she broke the program's single season rebounding record with 373, including a single game record 31 in a win at Heritage that season. This season Holmes averaged 14.6 points and 9.6 rebounds and registered 10 double-doubles to lead Loudoun County to a 19-4 record, a share of the Dulles District regular season title and the league tournament championship.

Lincoln Memorial is a Division II program that competes in the South Atlantic Conference. The school plans to move to Division I in 2011.

Maryland offers Stone Bridge DL Burns

In 2008, four members of the Stone Bridge football team accepted scholarship offers from Atlantic Coast Conference programs while two more earned preferred walk-on status. One year later, the pipeline from Ashburn to the ACC remains open.

Junior defensive lineman Rob Burns, a key starter for the Bulldogs' run to the 2009 Virginia AAA Division 5 final, now holds four scholarship offers from ACC programs. After picking up his first offer from Virginia in late December, Burns has added offers from Duke, Stanford, Wake Forest and Maryland in the last month.

The hulking 6-foot-7, 230-pound lineman wreaked havoc in the AAA Liberty District, earning first team all-district and second team All-Northern Region honors. In his junior season, Burns totaled 62 tackles from the defensive end position and led the Bulldogs with eight sacks.